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CHAPTER ONE

“Strange Introversions”

Newman, Mature Conversion, and the Poetics of Purgatory

Conversion, for Newman, was a process well suited to middle age. Although his novelistic depiction of a young man’s call to Catholicism, Loss and Gain, takes the form of a bildungsroman, his own conversion was a decidedly adult affair. In the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, first published in 1864, Newman recounts a long period of adult probation, contrasting his middle-aged decision to become a Catholic with his youthful adoption of Evangelical Christianity at age fifteen: “When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816) a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite creed. . . . I received it at once, and . . . retained it till the age of twenty-one.”¹ His first conversion is presented as a coming-of-age story par excellence, a sharp revolution in perception that occurred “at once” but, for all its force, “faded away” after a few years. In contrast, in describing his conversion to Catholicism thirty years later, Newman stresses the measured unfolding of his beliefs: “I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any difference of thought or of temper from what I had before. . . . I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption” (184). Juxtaposing the calmness of his adult conversion with the sturm and drang of his earlier spiritual bildung, Newman turns away from the nostalgic form of the revolutionary epiphany (“to be young was very heaven”) to devote his autobiography to a new, and distinctly Victorian, story of midlife revelation.²

This story, for Newman, is necessarily a gradual one. Capturing the slow pace of his spiritual awakening proved to be not simply an issue of philosophical importance but also one of political necessity. As he relates, the pace of his conversion became a source of constant rebuke: “it was made a subject of reproach to me at the time, and is at this day, that I did not leave the Anglican Church sooner” (147). Indeed, Newman’s pacing in leaving the Church of England has become one of the most notable features of his conversion story. Stephen Prickett writes, “His movement towards Rome was agonizingly slow. . . . Even the Bishop of Oxford’s condemnation of the Tract in his charge of May 1842 did not speed the death-throes of Newman’s Anglican existence”; and George Levine asserts that in “Newman’s world, as the history of his own conversion testifies, nothing that happens suddenly is trustworthy.”³ Perhaps the most notorious “reproach” of Newman’s timing in converting came from Charles Kingsley, causing the infamous skirmish that prompted Newman to write the Apologia in the first place. Kingsley’s accusation amounted to a charge that Newman had been disseminating Roman Catholic ideology from inside the Anglican Church all along, an argument based on the assumption that his conversion had to have occurred more quickly than had been disclosed. It becomes clear that Kingsley and Newman not only clashed over larger questions of religious doctrine, they also clashed over their understandings of conversion as a narrative. Kingsley presupposed a model in which religious calling arrives like a bolt from the blue, as in descriptions of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Newman countered with what might be described as an anti-Pauline model of conversion, one that could be understood as prosaic in its unfolding, deliberate, and less the product of youthful zeal than of middle-aged reflection.

The surprise was that many Victorians accepted Newman’s account of his mature conversion as compelling and authentic, spurning Kingsley’s claims even though he was a readier source of mainstream religious affiliation. This sympathetic reception of Newman’s work amounted to a complete about-face in public perception, brought about in no small part by his ability to capture conversion convincingly as a gradual process instead of an epiphany. As “agonizingly slow” as his conversion seemed, it was this quality of uneventful development that won Newman sympathizers across religious denominations. The success of Newman’s autobiography also revealed a wider interest among Victorian readers for accounts of mature transition, middle age being a category of self-identity that was emerging contemporaneously in the nineteenth century.⁴

On the whole then, the Apologia can be said to have accomplished many purposes, serving not simply as an effective defense against detractors but also as an introduction for readers to the gradualist vision that pervades Newman’s theological and poetical work more broadly. As Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman said of Loss and Gain, “to call the work before us a novel, or even a story, would be a misapplication of the terms. It pretends to no plot. . . . [T]he object of this beautiful work is to trace the gradual working of Grace upon a mind.”⁵ This process is more fully elaborated in the Apologia, an account not only autobiographical in nature but also devoted to illustrating a mature, not youthful, conversion. The vision of gradualism found in these works reaches a new extreme in Newman’s depictions of the ultimate mature “conversion”: the transition between life and the afterlife. In sermons, tracts, and religious poetry, Newman transposes the model of slow progression on display in the Apologia and Loss and Gain to the afterlife, taking his earthly ideas about incrementally slow conversion to their furthest conceptual limit by imagining Judgment as a state of maturation. For Newman, this middle realm of the afterlife becomes “a time of maturing,” “a school-time of contemplation,” and an experience characterized by “strange introversion.”⁶ This emphasis on maturing as a central process differs markedly from earlier visions, like Dante’s, in which this middle realm of the afterlife is imagined as a mountain with ascending trials conveyed as physical torments. Instead, Newman envisioned purgatory as a state for imperceptible and inward change that takes place over an immeasurable duration, a seeming infinitude that ends when a soul ascends to heaven. Newman’s fascination with portraying Judgment as a gentler state for improvement proved to be a constant throughout his career as both an Anglican and a Catholic, surfacing in his earliest unpublished Anglican sermons dating back to 1825, his most inflammatory work, Tract 90 (1841), and later in his widely read Catholic devotional poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865). The mystery is that Victorian readers who were outraged by the Anglican purgatory he proposed in Tract 90 found consolation in an almost identical model of purgation offered twenty years later, this time in poetic form in The Dream.

The question remains today of why The Dream of Gerontius was so popular with mainstream Victorian audiences. Our ingrained historicist instincts tell us that this should not have been the case. After all, Newman was the one who made purgatory a subject of national ire in the first place. When Newman first published Tract 90, his suggestion that Anglicans could believe in a non-Catholic version of purgatory stirred considerable controversy that lasted for decades after its publication. To understand the uproar that Newman caused, and subsequently calmed, requires entering into one of the mysteries of religious history in the Victorian period. Historians of religion have ventured their own theories to explain how Newman found an unexpected degree of public reacceptance a generation after the Oxford Movement, but few of these explanations take into account the surprisingly unchanging nature of Newman’s ideas about purgatory, the topic of some of his most popular and unpopular published works. For example, studies of the aftermath of the Oxford Movement tend to fold reconciliation into the rise of modern concepts of liberal tolerance and accounts of the turn toward ritualism in poetry, approaches that smooth over the startling inflexibility of Newman’s ideas about the afterlife over the years and across a major conversion.⁷ The most common explanation for the poem’s success is that Newman redeemed himself in publishing his Apologia Pro Vita Sua to wide acclaim in 1864, a year before The Dream. Not only did this autobiography help him trump Kingsley’s charges of his being a Catholic in disguise all along, it won him general acceptance and paved the way for the success of his future writing with wider audiences. There is additional evidence that a shift occurred in anti-Catholic sentiment in the early 1860s and that this movement had begun waning by the time Newman published both the Apologia and The Dream.⁸ These theories partly explain Newman’s reacceptance by the British public in the 1860s, but they do not explain how purgatory became palatable too—and a model of purgatory strongly resembling the one from Tract 90.

Given the outcry that he inspired, it seems impossible that his devotional poem on the subject should be warmly embraced, and not just hotly disputed. And yet, embraced it was. The Dream became one of the best-known and, moreover, best-loved Victorian consolation poems about death. Some scholars place it second to Tennyson’s In Memoriam.⁹ By 1888, the poem’s twenty-four published editions had made their way into numerous Victorian households. General Gordon carried it with him on his campaign in Egypt prior to his death in Khartoum, and Edward Elgar turned it into a successful choral opera. Poets and professors alike bestowed their stamp of approval. Algernon Charles Swinburne praised its “genuine lyric note,”¹⁰ and Francis Hastings Doyle, Oxford Professor of Poetry, devoted a lecture to the poem in which he said it deserved “high commendation.”¹¹ Taking his commendation a step further, he urged the Oxford community to stop being “envenomed” by “the spirit of these religious differences” (123). The pièce de résistance is that no one better gratified Doyle’s wish than Newman’s old nemesis, Kingsley, who wrote in a private letter that he “read the Dream with awe and admiration. However utterly I may differ from the entourage in which Dr. Newman’s present creed surrounds the central idea, I must feel that that central idea is as true as it is noble.”¹² These statements came from the same man who had proclaimed Newman “worse than dead to Englishmen” in Fraser’s Magazine a few years earlier.¹³ Although Kingsley later tempered his praise with poison in a public review of the poem, he still backhandedly admired “the wonderful beauty of its poetry,” thereby initiating a reviewer tradition of separating the poem’s “poetry” from its overt Catholic theology.¹⁴

Although it is no longer the critical favorite that it was in the nineteenth century, The Dream of Gerontius remains of vital relevance in illuminating a crucial shift in the Victorian era, a turn toward embracing maturity and gradualism over youthful fervor as a central trope for historical change.¹⁵ As a literary work, The Dream went beyond simply garnering praise from unlikely sources; more broadly, it had an unprecedented ability to convert individual consolation into larger public conciliation, successfully redirecting Oxford Movement animosities for public consumption twenty years later. The anger that had brewed over the Tracts for the Times and Newman’s subsequent conversion found a soothing balm in his writing in the 1860s, most especially in his popular and comforting work of death consolation literature, The Dream. Consolation, a quality often presented as the modest legacy of Tractarian devotional poets such as John Keble and Isaac Williams, proved central to Newman’s understated method of framing his writing for an increasingly divided readership in the 1860s.¹⁶ This soothing quality, which G. B. Tennyson has identified as the limited accomplishment of Tractarian poetry, has been framed as part of The Dream’s initial success. Yet it is important to recognize that Newman used the form of death consolation poetry in The Dream to accomplish broader goals that resonated beyond individual comfort. His poem moved readers from private solace toward a larger easing of public tensions, and it did so largely by promulgating a gradualist mode of maturation, presenting inconceivably slow development as the means to achieve profound change. This brand of gradualism appealed to those seeking comfort and counsel in facing death but also to men including Doyle who sought to move past the pains of the Oxford Movement toward a reconciliation effected first on literary grounds.

It was ultimately on these literary grounds that Newman would prove most influential in mainstream Victorian culture, for as I show in subsequent chapters, the ideal of a gentler purgatory oriented around maturation, which Newman and other Victorian theologians increasingly espoused, served as a recurring metaphor in novels that capture the gradual, introspective trials of adult life. One example, which offers an introductory insight into the presence of mid-Victorian eschatology in fiction of the period, appears in Villette, a novel published in 1853, well after Newman’s publication of Tract 90. In Villette, Brontë depicts a staunchly Protestant heroine, Lucy Snowe, storm-blown and seeking refuge in Catholic confession as well as in reading a Catholic theological book for “comfort,” a word that she repeats multiple times in discussing her heroine’s wary attraction to Catholicism. As Lucy recounts, the small theological work “possessed its own spell, and bound [her] attention at once. It preached Romanism; it persuaded to conversion. . . . The Protestant was to turn Papist, not so much in fear of the heretic’s hell as on account of the comfort, the indulgence, the tenderness holy Church offered.”¹⁷ The book sparks an immediate commentary on purgatory as the source of this sense of “tenderness” and “comfort,” for Lucy discusses how “the Catholic who had lost dear friends by death could enjoy the unspeakable solace of praying them out of purgatory” (413). This comforting model is clearly not Dante’s series of painful punishments but instead a uniquely Victorian conception of purgatory shaped by popular discussions of the afterlife midcentury, these discussions having been fostered by Newman and other vocal theologians of the period. And although Lucy treats these “indulgences” with suspicion, immediately bolstering her disavowal of Catholicism, the gradual model of purgatory that religious leaders like Newman advocated exerts a strange undercurrent in this secular novel, emerging at a time when Lucy seeks solace and undergoes strenuous introspection.

To trace the cultural pattern that I identify of purgatorial plotting in secular literary works, I begin by giving the religious-historical context for literary developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing how Victorian ideas about the afterlife—many of which were shaped in crucial ways by Newman and the Oxford Movement—pervaded the culture more broadly, appearing not only in theological works but also in fiction. I subsequently chart the reception history of one of Newman’s most curiously popular works, The Dream, showing how Victorians themselves underwent a gradual conversion in their regard for Newman’s writing and eschatology. Placing The Dream in the context of Newman’s theological controversies allows for this new understanding of how eras and movements are themselves conversion stories writ large. Ultimately, if Tract 90 opened a rift in public discourse that resisted closure, artistic representations of purgatory as a maturational state helped purge resentments from previous generations. The popularity of Newman’s vision of the afterlife consequently speaks not only to a Victorian fascination with theorizing development across discourses but also to an emerging sense of historical and artistic consciousness oriented around gradualism and mature deliberation rather than revolutionary fervor.

I. The Victorian Reinvention of Purgatory: Newman, Aristotle, and Eschatology

If Lucy Snowe in Villette comes to consider purgatory a source of consolation, it is largely because of the dramatic changes that this realm of the afterlife underwent in the wake of the Oxford Movement. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, purgatory became the center of a national controversy over defining the ideological boundaries of the Church of England. Far from resembling Dante’s vision of arduous ascent, in this new model spiritual bildung became the central process. In the Purgatorio, shades are depicted climbing Mount Purgatory, facing challenges on each terrace that are conveyed as physical torments, including starving, burning, and carrying heavy stones on one’s back.¹⁸ Newman espoused a dramatically different view in suggesting, as both an Anglican and a Catholic, that this punitive model of Judgment need not be the case. As he asserted in one of his Anglican sermons, “A great part of the Christian world, as is well known, believes that after this life the souls of Christians ordinarily go into a prison called Purgatory, where they are kept in fire or other torment, till, their sins being burned away, they are at length fitted for that glorious kingdom into which nothing defiled can enter. Now, if there were any good reason for this belief, we should certainly have a very sad and depressing prospect before us.”¹⁹ Instead, Newman presented purgatory as a kinder “Intermediate State,”²⁰ characterized as “a time of maturing that fruit of grace, but partly formed . . . in this life,—a school-time of contemplation” during which “the sins of youth are turned to account by the profitable penance of manhood.”²¹ Introspection and learning, not punitive duress, came to characterize his ideal of purgation in the afterlife. In reconceiving the afterlife to be gentler, Newman was at the forefront in redefining Judgment in two crucial ways: first, as a state of existence rather than a place with tiers, echelons, and geographical features as found in Dante’s Mount Purgatory, and second, as a time centering on individual maturation, not the trial by fire, as a model of spiritually productive eventfulness.²²

This story of the reinvention of purgatory in the Victorian era is one that unsettles familiar accounts of the trajectory of orthodox belief in the period. Despite the Victorian and modernist eras often being framed in terms of the decline of popular religion and a larger crisis of faith, the Victorians revived a long tradition of belief in purgatory. Historian Jacques Le Goff charts the entrance of the word purgatorium into the English lexicon in the twelfth century through the first stages of acceptance of this belief. Examining the history of Judgment four centuries later, Stephen Greenblatt gives an account of the “afterlife” of purgatory in post-Reformation England, finding literary evidence of the continued presence of Catholic eschatology in the figure of the ghost of Hamlet’s father.²³ Yet in more recent times, purgatory could be found hovering long after the ghost of Hamlet’s father first strode, or floated, offstage. Amid industrial expansion and the rise of liberalism, certain pre-Reformation beliefs once again found their way into mainstream British thought in the Victorian era. Beginning with the Oxford Movement, there was a resurgence of popular belief in the concept of purgatory.²⁴

This controversy can be said to have begun in Oxford in 1833 when a group called the Tractarians began publishing pamphlets, several of which advocated that Anglicans return to primitive church doctrines. One such doctrine, the belief in a progressive realm of Judgment, became a central point of discussion with the publication of the movement’s most provocative document in 1841, Tract 90, written by Newman. In the wake of the Catholic Emancipation and during a time of renewed anti-Catholic sentiment in England, Newman’s suggestion that all Anglicans, and not just Catholics, might espouse belief in a progressive state of Judgment was taken as a profession of Romanism, a charge only confirmed for many critics retrospectively by his conversion in 1845.²⁵ What Newman was trying to achieve in Tract 90, however, was not proselytizing on behalf of Catholics. Instead, he used the tract to draw a distinction between the “Romish” purgatory, which he defines ominously as “the conflagration of the world,” and a gentler alternative he presents as potentially appealing to his readers: “Another doctrine, purgatorian, but not Romish, is that said to be maintained by the Greeks at Florence, in which the cleansing, though a punishment was but a poena damni, not a poena sensûs; not a positive sensible infliction, much less the torment of fire, but the absence of God’s presence. And another purgatory is that in which the cleansing is but a progressive sanctification, and has no pain at all.”²⁶ The idea of the poena damni, which Newman characterizes as the pain of being deprived of God’s presence as opposed to sensible pain such as Dante’s penitents undergo in the Purgatorio, became integral to Newman’s model of Judgment. At first, this milder vision of purgatory met great resistance, provoking outrage on a national level, but it also increasingly became an identifiable part of popular religion in the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century.

Despite the initial controversy surrounding Newman’s eschatology, his concept of purgatory appealed to Victorians who, in their fervor for development, fused Newman’s ideas about the afterlife with emerging scientific concepts of gradualism, such as evolution. As one Victorian theologian wrote in a sermon on the subject,

“Evolution,” it has been pointedly said, “is in the air. It is the category of the age; a partus temporis; a necessary consequence of our wider field of comparison.” Evolution and Christianity have at last become partners, and although there is still some insecurity in this new alliance, yet every day, almost, seems to give to it a character and likelihood of greater permanence. Therefore it is only in agreement with the new method in the conception of things, and more especially of the essence of things, viz., life, that we pursue our inquiry about the Intermediate State in the direction of such development. For, apart from other considerations, if there be such a law of growth belonging to all life as we know it now, there is some antecedent probability in the hypothesis, that it may be the law which governs the life in other stages than those which we know at present.²⁷

In other words, evolution could continue into the afterlife, an idea that accommodated both emerging scientific concepts of gradualism and eschatology. Theological models of development therefore provided both an important counterpoint and an often-overlooked complement to evolutionary models of change; evolutionary theory and eschatology both evoke a central “mystery” in insisting that change can be subtle enough not to appear as change at all. Nevertheless, evolution describes growth in fundamentally material terms. Changes witnessed on the time scale of eons can be observed in manifest evidence: bodies, features, mutations, markings. In Newman’s conception of purgatory, all change was rendered intangible, bodiless, and abstract. A dramatic shift in temporal thinking is also similarly required by both models, each describing transformations that exceed the humble frame of an individual life span with parousia providing the limit of time and history in theological visions of the “last things.”²⁸ Yet once again, theological models of growth, such as those innovated by Newman, adamantly resist invoking the sensory as a measure for individual change. Belief in afterlife maturation defied even the heightened insight provided by the microscope, that iconic instrument in Eliot’s fiction, demanding a more abstract conception of “putting all the action inside,” to quote D. H. Lawrence’s praise of Eliot’s ability to capture the inner life.²⁹

This intermediate state of Judgment was notoriously difficult to represent in narrative form, eventually coming to be labeled “the problem child of theology” by theologians.³⁰ Victorians struggled to understand the basic storyline for purgatorial change. For example, in a piece titled When a Man Dies Where Does He Go? or, Some Things about the Intermediate State, one clergyman named John Thomas Pickering insisted, “Rest does not necessarily mean inaction. Rest of mind and soul does not imply cessation from energy and activity.”³¹ The idea that “rest” could equal “activity,” while preferable in some circles to trial by fire, remained conceptually difficult to grasp and, furthermore, difficult to explain. It also raised ethical questions about the proper role of acts and trials in achieving spiritual betterment. In questioning what kind of “activity” takes place in Judgment during a state of “soul sleep,” believers in the intermediate state came to be divided into two main factions: those who believed in a period of total unconsciousness while waiting for the Second Coming and those who believed in the soul’s growth through lucid dreaming in the afterlife.³²

On one side of the argument, the prospect of indeterminate, changeless waiting left little to the imagination. As Archbishop Richard Whately, Newman’s former tutor at Oxford, observed, the main “objection” to this model “is that it seems as if there were a tedious and dreary interval of non-existence to be passed, by such as should be supposed to sleep, perhaps for some thousands of years, which might elapse between their death and the end of the world.”³³ On the other side of the argument, theologians such as Pickering insisted that soul sleep was the highest form of action in the afterlife, a view similar to the one Newman expressed in Tract 90. In another tract on the subject, a Catholic woman named Sophia Scott sided with Newman in insisting that “souls are in a state of more activity and clearer consciousness”; she laments, “What shall we say to convince you that in that blessed separate state kept and guarded by the Good Shepherd Himself, there is a great work going on, and no inactivity?”³⁴ Anglicans such as William Ince, Canon of Christchurch, coincided with many Catholics in further expressing the need for a conception of the afterlife that “allows room both for thought and [for] action,”³⁵ a position supported by one of the most high-profile Victorian writers on the subject, millenarianist E. H. Bickersteth, who described the intermediate state as “in the first place . . . a state of rest. . . . Secondly, it is a state of consciously living to God. . . . The rest of those who sleep in Christ is no condition of unconscious inactivity, but of intelligent fellowship with God and fruition of His love.”³⁶

This ideal of restful action and “consciously living” (despite being dead) raised a number of confounding paradoxes. Time in Judgment was conceived as being both terminal, or “intermediary” and hence leading to another state, and also immeasurable in quantifiable terms. Consequently, believers were faced with the prospect of dailiness without days, of endurance of the prosaic without a sense of the diurnal, and with an abstract idea that their souls would benefit from experiential learning without undergoing anything understood as an “experience” per se. Changes in the intermediate state could not readily be conveyed through trials and dramatic turning points, as in Dante’s Purgatorio, but only through a more understated model of plotting. In Newman’s conception, prolonged contemplation becomes tantamount to the highest form of action, an inward action not readily translated into narrative “events” but instead registering as a subtle accretion.

Newman on the Poetics

This kind of contemplative action, as Newman conceives it, runs counter to Aristotle’s definition of “action” in the Poetics. Before Newman wrote Tract 90 and The Dream, he approached the problems of describing eschatology in explicitly narrative terms in his essay “Poetry with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics.”³⁷ In this essay, he insists, “Seldom does any great interest arise from the action” (2). Arguing against Aristotle for the precedence of character over action, Newman’s essay is curiously replete with references to the afterlife. Modern critics have been nonplussed by Newman’s repeated and incongruous invocations of the afterlife, most often dismissing this tangential focus on eschatology as Newman’s imposition of Victorian morality on the Poetics. Yet rather than reading these passages as cultural artifacts or as strains of Newman’s moral agenda, I read these intrusions of eschatology in another light. Indeed, underneath Newman’s insistence that Greek tragedy be read in light of a Christian afterlife, there lies a provocative model of how we weigh actions—and inactions—in narratives. The afterlife occupies an important role in the essay, surfacing at critical points when Newman delves into what happens during plot lulls, or what he terms the “stationary” and “irregular” (2) parts of a composition, and why he finds these parts most satisfying. Connecting these lulls to a kind of development he associates with change in the afterlife, Newman begins to think through a model of inward action that receives its fullest treatment in his subsequent works, notably The Dream of Gerontius, a poem that both explicates and itself performs uneventful development.

As Newman insists in his essay on Aristotle’s Poetics, the “charm of Greek Tragedy does not ordinarily arise from scientific correctness of plot”:

Seldom does any great interest arise from the action; which, instead of being progressive and sustained, is commonly either a mere necessary condition of the drama, or a convenience for the introduction of matter more important than itself. It is often stationary—often irregular—sometimes either wants or outlives the catastrophe. . . . The action then will be more justly viewed as the vehicle for introducing the personages of the drama, than as the principal object of the poet’s art; it is not in the plot, but in the characters, sentiments, and diction, that the actual merit and poetry of the composition are found. (2)

Newman provides an early incarnation of Markovits’s present-day argument that character precedes action in nineteenth-century literature in focusing on those places where a plot is “often stationary—often irregular.”³⁸ Grand turning points or “catastrophes” do not necessarily mark the most important parts of a composition for Newman. Instead, he asserts that the plot often continues onward and “outlives” them. In one place, he even posits the need for Christian belief in the “afterlife” to make sense of tragedy: “It is scarcely possible for a poet satisfactorily to connect innocence with ultimate unhappiness, when the notion of a future life is excluded. Honors paid to the memory of the dead are some alleviation of the harshness. In his use of the doctrine of a future life, Southey is admirable. Other writers are content to conduct their heroes to temporal happiness;—Southey refuses present comfort to his Ladurlad, Thalaba, and Roderick, but carries them on through suffering to another world” (17).³⁹ The injustice of tragic endings troubled Newman, who found the need for an afterlife (or a realm of “temporal happiness”) to help right the imbalance of innocent characters dying in a state of misery. For Newman, sacrifices and grand gestures thus needed to be brought inside the orbit of Christian morality, and poetry—a term which he uses interchangeably with tragedy in this essay—is the medium through which the otherworldly can be imagined. As Newman states, poetry “provides a solace for the mind broken by the disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover, the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give.”⁴⁰ The connection that he repeatedly draws in the essay between poetry and a form of understanding not available in earthly existence proves to be a twofold contradiction: Newman proposes that poetry captures the essence of the afterlife but also that it is still necessary to impose the afterlife on a tragic work to instill “right moral feeling.” He thereby ushers all tragedies into a realm where earthly time is of no account, for in Newman’s essay all tragedies properly end in the afterlife (whether they do so explicitly or by benefit of the reader’s framing agency). Grand finales are dissolved into a continuing narrative that concludes in the indefinite hereafter, and individual acts of closure—especially those that are doomed, tragic, and without “solace”—are obliterated by being subsumed into an ending that parousia alone can provide. Newman’s position can consequently be viewed as the inverse of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of action and ethics in Greek tragedy. In Arendt’s reading, actions have force because they occur in the absence of otherworldly retribution and reward, an essentially existentialist point of view.⁴¹

But if Newman diminishes the importance of death and closure in any given tragedy, it is not to privilege the “every-day” as the repository of meaning. Realism was never Newman’s main interest either as a theologian or as a novelist. “Why interrupt so transcendent a display of poetical genius by inquiries degrading it to the level of every-day events, and implying incompleteness in the action till a catastrophe arrives?” he asks.⁴² What, then, is Newman privileging in place of action if not the lulls of prosaic description? The simple answer would be lulls of a more transcendent nature—the lulls of an afterlife where action, in some form, “outlives” the catastrophe of death. It is no accident that in presenting his favored aspects of Greek tragedy, Newman speaks of “characters, sentiments, and diction,” making the subtle choice of distinguishing “characters” from “sentiments.” Newman’s afterlife is one in which the world of “sentiments” continues past death and past, however contradictorily, the world of the senses. These disembodied sentiments, although passively framed, are the highest form of action for Newman. Death, consequently, is only the end of one kind of action—physical action—and in his essay the most affecting movements in a drama are not feats and the final “act” of dying but instead come from extending final moments into an indefinite lull, an intermediate state of existence.

If the essay on the Poetics accomplishes any central goal, it is to privilege poetry, and specifically, poetic suspension, as the means through which to understand slow changes that underlie dramatic turning points. The essay comes as a discursive rally against representing change through purely discursive means, for Newman urges that poetry can give readers access to understanding the afterlife in ways that are unavailable in sermons and tracts. It is no surprise, then, that later in his career Newman avails himself of poetry to explain his own model of the afterlife. In the case of Newman’s Dream, his chosen poetic form allows him to accomplish something that proved out of reach in Tract 90; a quarter of a century after Tract 90, Newman turned to a new form that could allow him to explain and, moreover, to perform the eschatological conundrums he had previously discussed in tract form. Eschewing the purely explanatory (not to mention inflammatory) nature of the tract, Newman instead turned to devotional poetry. In taking a new, lyrical approach to the subject matter, he chose a poetic model that borrowed from both the circularity of liturgy and the suspended quality of dramatic monologues, thereby achieving a difficult balance between foregrounding Catholic concerns over death and the afterlife while still generating greater reader receptivity in his use of the soliloquy.

II. Victorians in Purgatory: The Dream of Gerontius and Poetic Conciliation

Although The Dream of Gerontius is fabled for finding its way into the hands of men of action like General Gordon, the poem imagines change as the product of radical inaction, the result of bodiless contemplation occurring in a sensory deprivation chamber. As the poem in recent times is rarely considered outside of its theological and religious-historical interest, it has been bypassed by a contemporary tradition of literary scholarship focusing on the political work of Victorian poetry. Newman’s prose is often included in considerations of the relation between poetry and politics, such as Isobel Armstrong’s seminal Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, which discusses how Newman’s sermons and tracts illuminate the political concerns of poets such as Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold, but his poetry is overlooked in such studies.⁴³ Despite The Dream’s many potential critical points of interest—including the lingering mystery of its success, its controversial content, and the political turnaround it helped achieve—Newman’s most popular poem has received little literary critical attention in our time. As a result, its popularity has yet to be addressed as a phenomenon firmly enmeshed in his poetics.

To understand Newman’s success in The Dream, we must bring the poem into current conversations about the long Victorian poem that rely on narrative theory, from which it has been absent, including recent work on dramatic monologues, explorations of lyric versus narrative modes, and studies of Victorian experimentation with hybrid genres. This approach is embodied by scholars such as Monique Morgan, whose recent work provides a model for the kind of scholarship on the long Victorian poem that could yield new insights into Newman’s approach in The Dream.⁴⁴ Indeed, The Dream is a worthy example for deeper study given the unusual narrative methods Newman employs to capture individual change over a substantial poetic duration. Considered alongside other long poems of the period, notably Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the work with which it is most frequently compared, The Dream differs radically in its vision of a central speaker’s development.⁴⁵ In Memoriam is oriented around a central figure whose anguished doubt gives the poem its vital trajectory and intimacy. For example, many passages are devoted to the urgent questioning of Hallam’s existence after death and the possibility for future development.⁴⁶ In contrast, in Newman’s vision of purgatory, Gerontius’s salvation is ensured upon his entering the realm of Judgment. As a result, his journey is not one from doubt to increasing faith, for he instead undergoes a central process of dispossession of selfhood and the cleansing of self-interest. To put it slightly differently: the poem as a whole is not about personhood but about process, about conversion, not the convert. And just as the speaker’s musings vary from those of Tennyson in In Memoriam, so too does the poetic form in which these musings take shape. The certainty of an afterlife that opens the poem marks an important distinction—a distinction that plays out on a formal level in The Dream. To capture his vision of conversion, Newman undermines a Tennysonian emphasis on the lyrical “I,” found in both the epic melancholia of In Memoriam and Victorian dramatic monologues, borrowing instead from the suspension of liturgy.

This reading of The Dream as a poem that uniquely partakes of liturgy is necessarily situated in the context of poetics movements of the time, notably, the turn toward ritualism in the 1860s. As I contend, The Dream may be understood as part of a renewed interest in ritualism, but it is also something more. In brief, the poem is evidence of Newman’s ability to navigate the shifting terrain of the 1860s and to make death-consolation literature the site of his own brand of subversive orthodoxy. It exemplifies Newman’s ability to craft what I term a “poetics of conciliation,” or a poetic form that accommodates Catholic liturgy and secular verse, as well as formal paradoxes including temporal suspension and narrative progression, sensory description and portrayals of disembodiment. In its interplay between quoted Catholic ritual and soliloquies, The Dream invokes ritual in ways more explicit, and potentially more off-putting, than were pursued by other popular devotional poets of his time, notably, Anglo-Catholic devotional poets such as Christina Rossetti, for Newman quotes directly and at length from rites performed in the Roman Catholic mass. At the same time, he also partakes of provocative dramatic monologues by Tennyson and Browning to upend their madhouse meditations. Newman thereby stages a conversion of the dramatic monologue itself from lyric to liturgy. He uses Gerontius’s monologues to capture a suspended, lyrical quality and simultaneously to critique the “unconstrained lyrical ‘I’” found in works such as “St. Simeon Stylites” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation.”⁴⁷ This blend of ritualist poetry and soliloquies allowed Newman to create a devotional drama with many speakers, a hybrid that against all odds effectively appealed to Victorians more disposed to reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam than Catholic liturgy.⁴⁸ Newman’s hybrid form also allowed him to use poetic methods to accomplish ideological ends: only in crafting a “poetics of conciliation” could he successfully perform, and not simply describe, the theological conundrums at the heart of his conception of purgatory as a place for gradual change.

Reading (Around) Ritual: The Organization of The Dream

On a surface level, The Dream’s clearly demarcated structure may have partly contributed to its success. The poem is divided into seven numbered sections and moves from quoting hymns and Catholic rites to including a greater number of subjective reflections on the state of the soul after death. In the first section, an old man named Gerontius lies on his deathbed. The priest and his assistants administer the final rites, and Gerontius passes into the afterlife. These rites and prayers for the dead, which dominate part 1, give way in part 2 to meditative soliloquies as Gerontius arrives in the afterlife. Gerontius’s Soul then reflects on his disembodied state and his new understanding of time and the lack of senses in the afterlife. He subsequently encounters guiding angels and taunting demons, then glimpses God before finally being laid to rest in purgatorial waters at the poem’s conclusion in section 7. These waters provide a final cleansing period of contemplation that readers glimpse before the poem ends.

As The Dream proceeds through its seven sections, visual divisions (including section breaks and line breaks between speakers) effectively separate the religious rites and liturgy quoted in the poem from the more seemingly secular soliloquies, making it easy to excerpt and favor certain passages—as readers like General Gordon evidently did. Soon after his death, Gordon’s personal copy of The Dream was returned to England, where it found its way into Newman’s hands.⁴⁹ The copy had Gordon’s pencil notations throughout, and in 1889, reproductions of these selective markings were made available to the public.⁵⁰ Readers were known to copy these markings into their own editions of the poem, the most famous example being Newman himself.⁵¹ Gordon’s personal notations were thus one unofficially sanctioned way for non-Catholics to encounter the poem.

It is interesting that the poem’s opening, which includes religious rites from the Catholic mass, is not marked in Gordon’s personal edition. As Gerontius says in the opening,

Jesu, Maria—I am near to death,

And thou art calling me; I know it now.

Not by the token of this faltering breath,

This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow,

(Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!)

’Tis this new feeling, never felt before,

(Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!)

(5)

Observations about his personal condition, “This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow,” alternate with lines that echo hymns and biblical lamentation, “Mary, pray for me! . . . Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!” This division between personal reflection and ceremony becomes more pronounced later in the poem when the ritualism of part 1 meets the soliloquies of part 2. As part 1 proceeds, Gerontius’s life ends and the poem increasingly yields to a full quotation of Catholic ritual, including a chorus of Assistants chanting the rite for commending a departing soul to God, “Kyrie eleïson, Christe eleïson, Kyrie eleïson,” followed by “Holy Mary, pray for him,” all taken from the Catholic mass (6). Newman here exceeds the ritualism ascribed to devotional writers of the period who were also influenced by Tractarianism, for example Christina Rossetti.⁵² Although her poems include an array of ritualistic elements that invoke the Anglo-Catholic mass, including “Great mitred priests,” “incense turned to fire / In golden censers,” and “lamps ablaze and garlands round about,” unlike Newman, she does not quote from religious services verbatim and at length.⁵³

In contrast, Newman’s direct, lengthy inclusions from the Roman Catholic mass in the first section could potentially be controversial content for Victorian readers and might give a staunch Evangelical Christian like Gordon pause. And indeed, pausing is most likely what happened for many readers of the poem—pausing, that is, and skipping. Tellingly, in his copy, Gordon marks the lines that precede the introduction of Roman Catholic rites and Gerontius’s words “Pray for me, O my friends,” but then skips over the rites themselves and the following parts where the Priest and Attendants speak. The next passage that he marks at length is the soliloquy following Gerontius’s death that opens section 2, which gives the speaker’s first impressions of the afterlife as a disembodied soul. This is the same passage cited by Doyle as being the best part of the poem: “The finest thing it contains is the early soliloquy of Gerontius when he finds himself, as he believes at first, alone with infinity” (115). Doyle further says that he prefers “the blank verse; the speeches rather. The lyrical portion are, in my judgment, less successful . . . [and] do not move me much more than those average hymns which people, who certainly are not angels yet, sing weekly in church” (117). By the “lyrical portion” Doyle means the more overtly religious parts that partake of Roman Catholic liturgy. Therefore, either implicitly or explicitly, Doyle and Gordon both recommend a strategy of reading around the most openly Catholic parts of the poem.

In thus reading along with Gordon and Doyle, as Victorian readers themselves did, contemporary readers can gain a new understanding of the poem’s early reception history, and more specifically, of how Newman’s demarcated structure allowed Victorian readers to skip, skim, and otherwise exclude the most overtly ritualistic elements of the poem. This insight into Victorian reading practices affords crucial new information about the poem’s success, for it helps to explain how readers rationalized their own, seemingly perverse, delight in the poem; they did so through a strategy of selective reading based on the belief that they could excise the “Catholic parts” of the poem, in particular, the rites and rituals of part 1. But the question remains, is such an extraction really possible? By skipping or critically dismissing part 1, could Victorians truly quarantine themselves from the poem’s Catholic content, as they so claimed? The answer, quite simply, is no.

Upon closer investigation, one finds that the most beloved parts of the poem, the soliloquies that readers gave themselves full license to enjoy, in fact contain the most controversial views in the poem. Indeed, in the soliloquies, Newman again sets forth the views on purgatory he had articulated in Tract 90. Yet for some reason, when presented in soliloquies in The Dream—and not in Tracts for the Times—these views passed muster. Newman had succeeded in fostering the illusion that readers could read around the Catholic parts of the poem, while in fact smuggling his most controversial eschatology in plain sight by embedding these views in the most accessible, comforting, and seemingly nondenominational parts of the poem: the soliloquies.

Progressive Suspension: The Soliloquies

The soliloquy that opens part 2 is especially pivotal in bringing Catholic ritualistic elements into a larger narrative of conversion between life and the afterlife. Lines assigned to “Gerontius” are now spoken by the “Soul of Gerontius” and soon after by a “Soul” after an Angel comes down to assure him that he is saved, a precondition for entering purgatory. By the end of the poem, Newman takes this process of deindividualization to its limit when Gerontius becomes one of a chorus of undifferentiated “Souls in Purgatory.” Using the soliloquy, an introspective and self-revelatory form employed in dramatic monologues, Newman moves away from developing his protagonist’s individual identity by way of first-person revelations. Instead, he has his protagonist reflect on becoming part of a general pool of unnamed souls. This diffusion of the protagonist’s identity jars with the sense of character development as a process of increasing specification and self-exposure over time. In The Dream, the protagonist instead sheds character as the poem progresses, becoming less individualized as a character with a marked disposition. The soliloquies therefore help Newman to enact a central principle of his conception of purgatory, the cleansing of self-interest and the purging of individual persona, while working through a more seemingly secular form usually devoted to revealing character and presenting persona.

They also allow Newman to achieve a balance between suspension and progression that lies at the heart of his idea of purgatory as a state of productive waiting. After partaking of the suspended effect of apostrophe—exemplified by the lamentations, prayers, and spoken rites of the opening section—the poem further inducts readers into a purgatorial mode of progress with its soliloquies.⁵⁴ The apostrophic quality of Gerontius’s cries—“Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!”—works much like his subsequent soliloquizing in providing lyric suspension while still contributing to the overall narrative of a man journeying to the afterlife. By definition, this narrative in verse must continue moving forward though Newman uses poetic devices to help suspend narrative elements and to create a sense of change that is internalized, reflective, and discursive in nature. As Jonathan Culler writes, “Apostrophe resists narrative because its now is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a now of discourse, of writing.”⁵⁵ Newman, accordingly, employs apostrophe and soliloquy to resist narrative’s pull, thereby capturing gradual development on the level of poetic plotting. But it is important to realize that he employs this model of poetic plotting with a larger goal in mind: that of making purgatorial gradualism understandable, despite its seeming contradiction between suspension and movement. Newman’s use of devotional poetry thus allows him to perform purgatorial gradualism rather than simply explain it as he did in Tract 90.

Exploring the tension between narrative and lyric modes in the long Victorian poem, Morgan shows how verse meditations can yield this subtle form of narrative movement. She makes the case that the dramatic monologue especially exemplifies a “seamless blend of lyric and narrative temporalities” (160). Soliloquies can be said to function similarly in combining lyric with narrative elements to achieve equipoise between stasis and movement. This balance between lyric and narrative modes is the temporal essence of purgatory—a state caught between progress and suspension. Fittingly, this temporal paradox of progressive suspension is the subject of Gerontius’s first soliloquy:

. . . How still it is!

I hear no more the busy beat of time,

No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse;

Nor does one moment differ from the next.

I had a dream; yes:—someone softly said

“He’s gone;” and then a sigh went round the room.

And then I surely heard a priestly voice

Cry “Subvenite;” and they knelt in prayer.

I seem to hear him still; but thin and low,

And fainter and more faint the accents come,

As at an ever-widening interval.

(14)

Time has not stopped; the “interval” between Gerontius’s moment of death and his reflections is “ever-widening.” The speaking of “Subvenite,” the responsorial recitation in the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, marks a countertime, reappearing at intervals to offset a subjective, lyrical, and discursive time of meditation from earthly time marked by ongoing spoken rites and the poem’s meter.⁵⁶ He is reassured that change will continue unfolding even though it cannot be measured by even the smallest narrative unit, the moment, let alone more dramatic narrative markers such as events and turning points. As the Angel next explains, Gerontius’s sense of time passing slowly is irregular and does not correspond to the actual speed of his journey between death and purgatory.

Thou art not let; but with extremest speed

Art hurrying to the just and Holy Judge:

For scarcely art thou disembodied yet.

Divide a moment, as men measure time,

Into its million-million-millionth part,

Yet even less than that the interval

Since thou didst leave the body. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Precise and punctual, men divide the hours,

Equal, continuous, for their common use.

Not so with us in th’ immaterial world;

But intervals in their succession

Are measured by the living thought alone,

And grow or wane with its intensity.

And time is not a common property;

But what is long is short, and swift is slow,

And near is distant, as received and grasped

By this mind and by that, and every one

Is standard of his own chronology.

(22–23)

The “hurrying” that immediately follows Gerontius’s death appears as stasis to him, and this sense of uneventful reflection is crucial to Newman’s ideas about conversion as a gradual rather than revolutionary process. Depicting the ultimate conversion from life to the afterlife, Newman attempts to have the best of both worlds: the temporality of the earthly poet—“precise,” “punctual,” and metered—and the temporality of suspended time in which the “fruit of grace” can go through a process of “maturing” (“Intermediate State,” 377) without being hurried and without conforming to measurable standards. This contradiction of a seemingly timeless duration is one of the central paradoxes Newman strives to represent. In his conception, purgatory occurs outside of earthly time, but it remains finite and telos-oriented. The goal of purgatory is to prepare souls for their exit from this state and their entrance into paradise. Yet despite unfolding in time, one’s duration in purgatory is indefinite, immeasurable, and not for “common use.” In trying to represent this temporal paradox, Newman uses soliloquies to explain his concept of the timeless duration while at the same time performing it, an effect uniquely achieved through poetic means. In other words, the soliloquies allow Newman to perform suspended contemplative action in the very act of describing it to readers, thereby uniting form and content in a way previously unavailable to him in his sermons and tracts.

Converting the Dramatic Monologue

Yet if Newman uses soliloquies to capture the “seamless blend of lyric and narrative temporalities” associated with the dramatic monologue, he also uses soliloquies to turn the dramatic monologue on its head. In featuring a lone central speaker, The Dream reframes the conflict between spiritual progress and egoism that Tennyson and Browning imagine in poems including “St. Simeon Stylites” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” respectively.⁵⁷ Johannes Agricola declares, “For I intend to get to God, / For ’tis to God I speed so fast” (lines 6–7) but circularly asserts that “God’s Breast” (line 8) is “where I have always lain” (line 11). This form of spiritual claim jumping involves a problem of not knowing, or at least not acknowledging, the difference between “reach and grasp.”⁵⁸ In trying to collapse this distinction, dramatic monologue speakers such as St. Simeon Stylites attempt to bypass the between state of being “unfit for earth, unfit for heaven” (line 3), a holding pattern that constitutes the central condition of growth in purgatory and also the suspended form of the dramatic monologue itself. But whereas Tennyson and Browning channel suspension and gradual revelation into doubt through dramatic irony, Newman tells us that Gerontius is saved from the beginning. This certainty of salvation marks an important difference between Newman’s poem and Tennyson’s and Browning’s dramatic monologues, a contrast more starkly realized when considering a work such as “Tithonus,”⁵⁹ given Tennyson’s emphasis on immortality without redemption and stasis without the promise of progress, however imperceptible. In its structure, The Dream consequently operates quite differently than dramatic monologues by Tennyson and Browning, for The Dream instead works as a reassurance against doubt, using the soliloquies first to entertain apprehension and doubts and then turning to the explicatory dialogue with the Angel to dispel them. In this way, doubt of a spiritual nature is shifted to doubt of an experiential kind: the uncertainty of an individual in unfamiliar circumstances, not the doubt of someone on the brink of damnation. Angels accordingly take a leading hand and demons are relegated to the sidelines, where they appear comical and impotent as Satan’s cheerleaders, speaking in a doggerel reminiscent of Christina Rossetti’s goblin men: “What’s a saint? / One whose breath / Doth the air taint” (28).

The main threat in the poem instead comes from the isolation and fear of solipsism Gerontius experiences after first arriving in the afterlife, an anxiety that the poem itself performs by briefly collapsing into “the unconstrained lyrical ‘I’” of the dramatic monologue.⁶⁰ Gerontius’s experience as a lone speaker is one of “deep rest” but also of strenuous “pain” in having his “thoughts” driven back “upon their spring” (14). His initial meditations are portrayed not restfully but as an act of self-cannibalism: “I now begin to feed upon myself, / Because I have nought else to feed upon” (15). This negative isolation is remedied by the Angel’s eventual appearance and the poem’s expansion into dramatic forms; thus, conversation rescues Gerontius from the social vacuum imagined at the core of his soliloquies. In relief, his soul says,

Now know I surely that I am at length

Out of the body: had I part with earth,

I never could have drunk those accents in,

And not have worshipped as a god the voice

That was so musical; but now I am

So whole of heart, so calm, so self-possessed,

With such a full content, and with a sense

So apprehensive and discriminant

As no temptation can intoxicate.

(20)

Only by losing self-possession—the transition from “Gerontius” to nameless “Soul” in purgatory—can the central speaker become fully “self-possessed” and “full content.” The pun on “content” as both an emotional state and one of repletion points up the paradox of feeling substantial only when removed from the world of earthly substance, but it also reconfigures the earlier cannibalism imagery as benign self-satisfaction: instead of eating away at oneself through depleting rumination, the Soul now feels “whole of heart,” a strangeness of eating one’s cake and having it too. This sense of paradoxical fullness counteracts the smug contentment of speakers such as Browning’s Johannes Agricola, who asserts that he was made by God “because that love had need / Of something irreversibly / Pledged solely its content to be” (lines 28–30). Newman illustrates a contentment that comes only with the loss of one’s physical body—a paradox at the heart of his ideas about purgatory as a place of disembodied substance.

Extremity: The Body in the Afterlife

To capture his speaker’s newly disembodied contentment, Newman develops various techniques for representing the experience of complete sensory loss—a state that would seem to defy representation. In Gerontius’s opening, the prayer “Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!” is echoed in his first concerns in the afterlife when he fears the loss of his body, this state of “extremity” involving a lack of his own physical extremities:

’Tis strange; I cannot stir a hand or foot,

I cannot make my fingers or my lips

By mutual pressure witness each to each,

Nor by the eyelid’s instantaneous stroke

Assure myself I have a body still.

(15)

At first Gerontius mistakenly thinks that he has maintained all of his senses except for sight, and this blindness functions as a synecdoche for complete sensory loss. As the Angel explains to him:

Hast thou not heard of those, who after loss

Of hand or foot, still cried that they had pains

In hand or foot, as though they had it still?

So is it now with thee, who has not lost

Thy hand or foot, but all which made up a man.

(33)

The Angel’s metaphor of having a phantom limb is one that Newman extends to help readers understand the implications of having a phantom body. In Newman’s clever poetic strategy, this phantom body is represented as an absence of sense perceptions that can be understood only through the uncanny continuance of perception. He therefore makes the task of representing this loss one that can in fact be understood in earthly terms. This retentive illusion allows his character to recount experiences that readers can comprehend while they can still interpret them as otherworldly. Absent senses are thus invoked through synesthesia, or as a ghostly presence recalled only through other senses, notably, hearing and touch, which act as surrogates for a full range of sensation: “I hear a singing; yet in sooth, / I cannot of that music rightly say / Whether I hear or touch or taste the tones” (16).

In addition to describing the sensation of having a “phantom body,” Newman also presents this disembodiment as a feeling of being physically enfolded in God’s giant palm.

Another marvel: someone has me fast

Within his ample palm; ’tis not a grasp

Such as they use on earth, but all around

Over the surface of my subtle being,

As though I were a sphere . . .

(16)

Gerontius finds himself safely in the womb-like palm of God, a divine and surprisingly literal realization of God being with him in “extremity,” Gerontius’s lack of physical extremities being soothed by God’s celestial hand. Worries of exhaustion and depletion are now replaced with images of gestation, later echoed in the final scene of immersion in the prenatal waters of purgatory. Gestation, with its creative rather than destructive potential, functions as an analogous temporal model for Newman’s idea of purgatorial progress and proves central to the poem’s appeal as a work focused on regeneration as consolation.

From Consolation to Conciliation

The ability to give consolation, a quality prized by Victorian readers of The Dream, has been framed as the legacy of Tractarian poetry but a modest and ephemeral one at best. G. B. Tennyson asks, “What, for example did the Tractarians accomplish in their poetry as poetry? Certainly it could not be argued that they left any single work of great poetry or even a single great short poem.”⁶¹ In the long term, he finds that consolation was simply not enough: “Most readers of poetry want more than a soothing tendency. . . . Readers who cannot bring to the reading of poetry a sympathy with the ideas the Tractarians were at pains to advance will probably not be won over by the power of the poetry alone” (190). Although twentieth-century interest in Newman’s poetry waned, many Victorians with little sympathy for Tractarianism were in fact professedly won over by Newman’s “poetry alone”—the “alone” part being a crucial component in their approval, at least as they understood it.⁶² This early perception of the poem as a work made up of discrete, isolatable parts proved crucial to its acceptance—though it was by no means true that readers could perform a neat excision of the poem’s theological content and achieve sanitized readings, as they believed. The frequently excerpted soliloquies were in fact the center of Newman’s eschatological musings. Newman’s success resides precisely in fostering this illusion. The poetic form he chose allowed readers to come to a consoling, albeit false, conclusion: namely, that a distinction could be made between his poem’s Catholic content and its “poetry.”

This distinction was made by Kingsley, Doyle, Gordon, and many others in their praise of The Dream. As Doyle says of the poem, “Of the doctrines involved in this striking production it is unnecessary to say more than that there is nothing, except the bare idea of purgatory (a theological and not a poetical blemish), which need prevent any Christian, or, indeed, any one who believes in the providence of God, from valuing it according to its deserts. It is built mainly upon those noble foundations which were laid eighteen hundred years ago, and which are still the common inheritance of Christendom, the common centre of our European civilisation.”⁶³ After suggesting that the poem’s subject and form can be considered separately—lyricism outweighing and even redeeming or canceling out the religious content—Doyle immediately claims the same religious heritage for all Catholics and Anglicans and urges an Oxford ceasefire. He ends by lamenting the “antagonism,” “hostile zeal,” and “unsympathetic demeanor” of those at Oxford with grudges against Newman, and he appeals to his audience’s “genuine respect” and “undiminished affection” for an individual of such worth (123). Doyle’s final comments are evidence of a widespread phenomenon in the poem’s reception history: its ability as a poem to foster a slippage between consolation and conciliation, even when there is nothing especially compromising about the poem ideologically speaking. After all, it is almost exactly the same model of purgatory that Newman presented in Tract 90.

Thus, despite its controversial content, The Dream became renowned for offering relief to its readers, but it ultimately succeeded because it offered readers something more: a cleansing of animosities from the Oxford Movement. As Newman writes in his essay on Keble, “Poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose upon, for the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets. . . . Now what is the Catholic Church, viewed in her human aspect, but a discipline of the affections and passions? What are her ordinances and practices but the regulated expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a ‘cleansing,’ as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul?”⁶⁴ Newman distinguishes the “cleansing” of Catholics from the lesser consolation prize of nonbelievers reading poetry to find “refuge.” In taking The Dream to heart, many of Newman’s non-Catholic readers may not have followed the kind of cleansing regime its author imagined as a strictly Catholic (and indeed purgatorial) experience, instead finding consolation in his work. But this consolation was nevertheless not without wider implications than merely soothing a few “sick souls.” Newman’s consoling poem did not merely provide refuge for those facing death and seeking a literary balm. It also helped many of its readers perform a different kind of purgation—a cleansing of bitterness following Tract 90.

Accordingly, religious historians have marveled at the poem’s conciliatory powers. Geoffrey Rowell observes not only that The Dream “reached a far larger audience” and “enjoyed great popularity” but also that, ultimately, through The Dream, Newman “presented an understanding of purgatory which was acceptable to many outside his own communion.”⁶⁵ Novels such as Villette reveal this process of consideration midcentury, and subsequent chapters discuss the resonance of Newman’s theological writing and midcentury eschatology in works of fiction more broadly, showing how a new consoling model of the afterlife eventually surfaced in an array of novels as a metaphor for gradual change and maturation of the most subtle, beneficial kind. Consequently, regardless of whether or not Anglicans fully came around, the poem certainly helped Victorians (including Kingsley) to purge their bitter feelings about Tract 90 and its fallout. The model of the afterlife that had once been a source of vexed conflict instead became a site of soothing consolation. Therefore, more than just offering refuge and relief, purgatory finally came to occupy a central position as both a point of controversy and grounds for larger compromise. In the end, The Dream can be said to have helped Newman accomplish one of his previous, and most ambitious, goals: that of making purgatory into a via media after all.

The Afterlife of The Dream

Newman’s intermediate model of purgatory would continue to permeate Victorian literature and culture long after the appearance of Tract 90. Most explicitly, Newman’s eschatology surfaced in literary visions of the afterlife and theological tracts published later in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Such literary visions of judgment include Margaret Oliphant’s “The Land of Darkness” and “A Beleaguered City” as well as C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, all works that present a non-Catholic vision of purgatory in which the soul’s main “activity” is to interpret its own state, as Gerontius does for most of The Dream.⁶⁶ In Oliphant’s “The Land of Darkness,” readers at first cannot be sure whether they are encountering a vision of purgatory as they follow the newly dead protagonist through regions in the afterlife dedicated to everything from hedonism to totalitarian tidiness. The tale concludes with a hellish circling back that casts doubt on the protagonist’s potential for progress. Yet this humbling regression simultaneously gives value to the difficulty of achieving progress in a place of unforeseeable duration. If limbo is desire without hope, purgatory is desire with hope, and in Oliphant’s open-ended conclusion the protagonist’s potential for hope gives the narrative the chance of being one of progressive linearity, instead of merely a story of circular resignation.⁶⁷ Similarly, in Lewis’s The Great Divorce a penitent soul enters an intermediate place of Judgment that slips either into hell or into heaven, depending on the choices he or she makes there. Those who continue in error are already in a state of hell without knowing it. Those who persist in improvement, often without it being recognizable to them, are living in a purgatory that can only retrospectively be understood as such.

In theology of the twentieth century, Newman’s influence is even clearer. During World War I, Newman’s gentler ideal of purgatory as a place for maturation experienced a tremendous resurgence, offering grieving families the consolatory prospect of continued growth for the many young men who had died in battle. General studies of modernism and twentieth-century religion rarely mention this facet of postwar fervor, but taking this brief interval in Britain’s religious history into account may contribute to a new understanding of twentieth-century responses to Victorian theology, ranging from tracts and war documents to literary works. As one professor of theology wrote in 1918, “Men are seeking assurance of life to come for those who have given their lives. . . . We hope as never before for an assured and abundant life after death.”⁶⁸ Letters home from the trenches reveal that soldiers deeply feared going to hell, especially when their last act might be that of killing another person. As one British soldier wrote home to his parents, “So you think that if a man is fighting on the side of righteousness and mercy no matter what kind of life he has led in the past he will not go to the purgatory as pictured by Dante. I agree.”⁶⁹ The belief in heaven offered the strongest comfort possible for many, but not everyone could embrace the idea of the soul’s immediate translation to paradise without a period of purgation, especially when acts of war had been committed in life. In response to an urgent desire for answers to philosophical quandaries, preachers, theologians, and popular writers began proposing that soldiers would go to a place for purging, but not “purgatory as pictured by Dante.”⁷⁰ Instead they would go to a purgatory as pictured by Newman. To soothe congregants, preachers increasingly recurred to the gentler Anglican models of purgatory that came to prominence in the Victorian era. Reflecting on the Oxford Movement’s influence during the war, one clergyman wrote in 1916,

The Oxford Movement helped to restore the old faith and practice. . . . The great European War has forced the sense of the loss of prayer for the dead not merely on numbers of Church people, but on very many who belong to Nonconformist bodies. The Reformers denied any intermediate state or place between Heaven and Hell; their descendants find little difficulty in the thought of a state of progress hereafter, and great difficulty in the belief that all but the pious “elect” are abandoned to an endless Hell.

It is surely, the duty of all, who have the opportunity, to help in bringing England back to the faith and practice of the Primitive Church.⁷¹

What had once been regarded as highly controversial Oxford Movement theology became an acceptable alternative for those seeking a model that eschewed continued violence in favor of gradual learning and growth.⁷²

As discussed in chapter 4, this conception of purgatory as a gentler state provided modernist writers, notably Woolf, with a metaphor for the nonviolent change that her characters contemplate and seek to achieve in The Years, a postwar novel that imagines the possibility for “another life” by way of a dramatic rereading of Dante’s Purgatorio. This reading of the Purgatorio, however, is crucially inflected with progressive ideas about the afterlife popularized in the previous century, for she presents purgatory as a maturational state and model of peaceful historical change. Purgatory, which appears by way of Dantean allusion and also as an extended metaphor, recurs to reveal both Eleanor Pargiter’s individual development from the Victorian period onward and, also, larger historical changes that Woolf’s characters hope to observe as the postwar future dawns.

Such examples make clear that the most profound influence of Newman’s writing was not to be found in overtly religious documents or in religious literary works that imaginatively sought to portray the afterlife per se. The Victorian fascination with purgatory as he conceived it received its most interesting treatment in secular fictions that used purgatory as a metaphor for gradual adult maturation. In the chapters that follow, I explore how methods for representing slow change in the afterlife came to appear, often as extended metaphors, in a range of novels from Little Dorrit to The Years. These works of fiction not only borrow from Victorian visions of the afterlife in using purgatory as a metaphor for the protagonist’s journey, they also borrow from the representational techniques that theologians such as Newman developed to put, as has been written of George Eliot, “the action inside.”